Dr Caitlin West

How Do You Know If You Have Faith? As we said in the last post, there's a difference between intellectually believing something is true and actually having a personal, lived faith. I might believe in God, but that doesn't automatically make me a faithful Christian. Technically speaking, even the devil believes in God. So the Catholic Church teaches that faith is more than just saying "I believe in God" or "I believe in Jesus." The Catechism gives us four practical attributes of true faith. So...

Have you ever had that moment when you're boarding an airplane and logically, intellectually, you know that flying is safe? You know that planes take off and land every day without incident. You know that statistically, you are far more likely to be killed by a falling fridge than in a plane crash. And yet, right at the moment the plane starts to take off, you get that jolt of fear. That spasm of panic. That voice in your head going: this is it, we're all going to die. That moment reveals...

What Is Faith, Actually? Okay, so here's a question that sounds really simple but actually isn't: what is faith? You've probably heard that word a bajillion times. It gets thrown around constantly: in church, in conversation, online. But I genuinely think faith is one of the most misunderstood words in all of religion. Because most of the time when people talk about faith, they mean something like this: when you come up against something in religion that seems illogical or doesn't quite make...